11/25/25 ADDS
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ODONIS ODONIS
Odonis Odonis(Royal Mountain Records)
Add date: 11.18.2025
Release date: 11.14.2025
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The best way to understand Odonis Odonis’ eclectic discography is to think of it as a multi-level nightclub with various rooms that cater to different niches, but are united by a curatorial vision. Down in the dingy basement plastered with band stickers and reeking of piss, you’ll find the trash-can-bashing, feedback-blasting, Mary Chain-worshipping surf-punk psychos heard on 2011’s Hollandaze sharing a bill with the atmospheric post-punk crew documented on 2014’s Hard Boiled Soft Boiled. On the ground floor, there’s an ultra-violet-lit black-box space where the rivetheads lurking in the shadows slowly creep toward the dancefloor and succumb to the deviant darkwave pleasures of 2016’s Post Plague and 2017’s No Pop. And then on the upper level, you’re subjected to a sensory-overloading industrial assault and thrust into a sea of thrashing bodies that blurs the line between rave and mosh pit, as epitomized by 2021’s Spectrums.
It’d make a lot of sense for the Toronto duo to stay put in the latter environment—after all, we live in a world where Molchat Doma are headlining the Hollywood Bowl, Lady Gaga is taking notes from Nine Inch Nails, and every town seems to have its own annual EBM festival. But instead of continuing to pump out electro-shocked bangers for your never-ending Goth Night, Odonis Odonis founders Constantin Tzenos and Denholm Whale have opted to switch off the strobe lights and power down their sequencers. “We just hit a wall with the industrial thing,” Tzenos admits. “We were like, ‘Okay, there's, like, a million bands—especially duos—that cropped up in the time that we started doing it.’ We went as far as we could with it, and I was just like, ‘I don't want to do this anymore.’”
You could sense a bit of that restlessness on 2023’s ICON EP, which, while hardly lacking for jackbooted beats and throat-shredding screams, featured an all-star crew of collaborators (including A Place to Bury Strangers, Tobacco, and SUUNS) that helped make Odonis Odonis’ metal machine music a little more malleable. But even that transitional release won’t prepare you for the dramatic makeover that Odonis Odonis undergo on the duo’s self-titled sixth album.
As Tzenos tells it, the period that followed the release of ICON effectively amounted to a full-scale system reboot. “After every album cycle, we’d always be like, ‘Oh, we gotta get something new out, man.’ But I just thought, ‘We've been a band for so long—let's take a break. Let’s just hang out and have some drinks and just make some music.” But while Tzenos and Whale knew what they didn’t want to do musically, it took some time to find a new direction. “We just started writing without any kind of preconceived notion of what we were trying to make,” Tzenos admits. “A lot of the songs just came from jamming.”
It’s tempting to think of Odonis Odonis as a full-circle/get-back move—as opening track “The Same” lures you into its thick Disintegration fog and bleak self-harm-themed lyrics, you’re reminded of a band that, back in the early 2010s, was so enamored with The Cure that they named one of their first songs “Mr. Smith.” After years in the industrial trenches, it feels like Odonis Odonis are reconnecting with their formative alt-rock favorites, be it Power Corruption Lies-era New Order on the shimmering “Highjacked,” or Love & Rockets on the gleaming, groove-driven goth-pop of “Come Alive” or the 1987-92 Creation Records roster on the blown-out shoegaze hymn “Hunter.” As Tzenos, “I think those sorts of influences always seep in no matter what. But I don't think we’re trying to be nostalgic with it.”
Indeed, Odonis Odonis is less about reliving teenage dreams than confronting adult anxieties. Like any musical artist of limited means, Odonis Odonis are trying to keep their heads above water in a perfect storm of post-pandemic inflation, invasive technology, and unchecked capitalism. And that stress is only compounded when they tend to their lives jobs outside the band: Whale works in the all-hustle/no-security world of independent concert promotion; Tzenos is a compositor for film and television staring down the threat of AI in his industry, all while navigating the uncharted terrain of new fatherhood.
Given all the pressures weighing on them, it’s not surprising the duo would want to blow off some steam by knocking out a hip-shaking, mind-bending instrumental jam like “Distraction,” which recalls Primal Scream in their Vanishing Point/XTRMNTR prime. “Work It Out” is a more overt act of raging against the machines—a bass-powered, post-punky rocker that channels generational malaise into an anthemic call-to-arms. And if the brooding “We Are Gods” presents a pessimistic diagnosis of the toxic narcissism that permeates the highest echelons of power, the closing dream-pop devotional “Bliss” sees Tzenos finding solace in the promise of a new dawn—with a cooing cameo from his toddler there to remind him why he must get his shit together and fight another day. In this light, Odonis Odonis’ move away from industrial music feels less like mere fatigue with a specific musical aesthetic than a philosophical rejection of the automation encroaching on all facets of our lives.
“That’s what we were feeling, 100 percent,” Tzenos says. “With industrial music, it’s like you can hit a button now and pop that shit out. I feel the same way about a lot of pop music—anything that's heavily AutoTuned or that has a very distinct genre style is going to be easily taken over by AI. So I just thought, ‘I want to make something that’s original to us.’ We wanted to make an emotive record and relay how we were feeling about all these massive changes that have been happening, not just in our lives, but in general. Like, where the fuck is the world heading? How is that affecting us? And how can we express it in a way that people can relate it to what’s happening in their lives? If we can make an honest record and put as much of ourselves as we can into this thing, you can’t replace that with a machine.”
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Royal Mountain Records
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
The best way to understand Odonis Odonis’ eclectic discography is to think of it as a multi-level nightclub with various rooms that cater to different niches, but are united by a curatorial vision. Down in the dingy basement plastered with band stickers and reeking of piss, you’ll find the trash-can-bashing, feedback-blasting, Mary Chain-worshipping surf-punk psychos heard on 2011’s Hollandaze sharing a bill with the atmospheric post-punk crew documented on 2014’s Hard Boiled Soft Boiled. On the ground floor, there’s an ultra-violet-lit black-box space where the rivetheads lurking in the shadows slowly creep toward the dancefloor and succumb to the deviant darkwave pleasures of 2016’s Post Plague and 2017’s No Pop. And then on the upper level, you’re subjected to a sensory-overloading industrial assault and thrust into a sea of thrashing bodies that blurs the line between rave and mosh pit, as epitomized by 2021’s Spectrums.
It’d make a lot of sense for the Toronto duo to stay put in the latter environment—after all, we live in a world where Molchat Doma are headlining the Hollywood Bowl, Lady Gaga is taking notes from Nine Inch Nails, and every town seems to have its own annual EBM festival. But instead of continuing to pump out electro-shocked bangers for your never-ending Goth Night, Odonis Odonis founders Constantin Tzenos and Denholm Whale have opted to switch off the strobe lights and power down their sequencers. “We just hit a wall with the industrial thing,” Tzenos admits. “We were like, ‘Okay, there's, like, a million bands—especially duos—that cropped up in the time that we started doing it.’ We went as far as we could with it, and I was just like, ‘I don't want to do this anymore.’”
You could sense a bit of that restlessness on 2023’s ICON EP, which, while hardly lacking for jackbooted beats and throat-shredding screams, featured an all-star crew of collaborators (including A Place to Bury Strangers, Tobacco, and SUUNS) that helped make Odonis Odonis’ metal machine music a little more malleable. But even that transitional release won’t prepare you for the dramatic makeover that Odonis Odonis undergo on the duo’s self-titled sixth album.
As Tzenos tells it, the period that followed the release of ICON effectively amounted to a full-scale system reboot. “After every album cycle, we’d always be like, ‘Oh, we gotta get something new out, man.’ But I just thought, ‘We've been a band for so long—let's take a break. Let’s just hang out and have some drinks and just make some music.” But while Tzenos and Whale knew what they didn’t want to do musically, it took some time to find a new direction. “We just started writing without any kind of preconceived notion of what we were trying to make,” Tzenos admits. “A lot of the songs just came from jamming.”
It’s tempting to think of Odonis Odonis as a full-circle/get-back move—as opening track “The Same” lures you into its thick Disintegration fog and bleak self-harm-themed lyrics, you’re reminded of a band that, back in the early 2010s, was so enamored with The Cure that they named one of their first songs “Mr. Smith.” After years in the industrial trenches, it feels like Odonis Odonis are reconnecting with their formative alt-rock favorites, be it Power Corruption Lies-era New Order on the shimmering “Highjacked,” or Love & Rockets on the gleaming, groove-driven goth-pop of “Come Alive” or the 1987-92 Creation Records roster on the blown-out shoegaze hymn “Hunter.” As Tzenos, “I think those sorts of influences always seep in no matter what. But I don't think we’re trying to be nostalgic with it.”
Indeed, Odonis Odonis is less about reliving teenage dreams than confronting adult anxieties. Like any musical artist of limited means, Odonis Odonis are trying to keep their heads above water in a perfect storm of post-pandemic inflation, invasive technology, and unchecked capitalism. And that stress is only compounded when they tend to their lives jobs outside the band: Whale works in the all-hustle/no-security world of independent concert promotion; Tzenos is a compositor for film and television staring down the threat of AI in his industry, all while navigating the uncharted terrain of new fatherhood.
Given all the pressures weighing on them, it’s not surprising the duo would want to blow off some steam by knocking out a hip-shaking, mind-bending instrumental jam like “Distraction,” which recalls Primal Scream in their Vanishing Point/XTRMNTR prime. “Work It Out” is a more overt act of raging against the machines—a bass-powered, post-punky rocker that channels generational malaise into an anthemic call-to-arms. And if the brooding “We Are Gods” presents a pessimistic diagnosis of the toxic narcissism that permeates the highest echelons of power, the closing dream-pop devotional “Bliss” sees Tzenos finding solace in the promise of a new dawn—with a cooing cameo from his toddler there to remind him why he must get his shit together and fight another day. In this light, Odonis Odonis’ move away from industrial music feels less like mere fatigue with a specific musical aesthetic than a philosophical rejection of the automation encroaching on all facets of our lives.
“That’s what we were feeling, 100 percent,” Tzenos says. “With industrial music, it’s like you can hit a button now and pop that shit out. I feel the same way about a lot of pop music—anything that's heavily AutoTuned or that has a very distinct genre style is going to be easily taken over by AI. So I just thought, ‘I want to make something that’s original to us.’ We wanted to make an emotive record and relay how we were feeling about all these massive changes that have been happening, not just in our lives, but in general. Like, where the fuck is the world heading? How is that affecting us? And how can we express it in a way that people can relate it to what’s happening in their lives? If we can make an honest record and put as much of ourselves as we can into this thing, you can’t replace that with a machine.”